Mashreq Private Bank says UAE wealth-outflow fears are overblown — and it's betting on a generational handoff instead

Mashreq Private Bank is on track for one of its strongest years in the past five years, according to its head, Vipul Kapur, despite earlier concerns about high-net-worth individuals leaving the UAE as geopolitical tensions challenged the country's safe-haven reputation. Confident in the business outlook and growth trajectory, the bank expanded its private banking team by 30% this year, adding both investment specialists and relationship managers to support rising client demand.

Kapur’s read? Years of Golden Visa-driven inflows, a maturing product shelf, and a regulatory framework built around long-term wealth holders cannot easily be “reversed,” Kapur says. Other established wealth hubs like Singapore, London, and Zurich have all weathered turbulence in their own backyards before, he argues, and the UAE's current test looks more like those than a systemic shock.

The families that have set up family offices in the UAE run trusts and foundations with 20- to 100-year time horizons, not two-to-three-year ones, Kapur says. They’ve made the decision to relocate here for several reasons. “They're looking at the place having the right kind of regulations, strong infrastructure, and [global connectivity],” he explains. “You can't take away from the fact that this is still a taxfree hub, and that it’s a place where living is easy, the infrastructure is fantastic, and it continues to grow.”

Regulatory changes have also done a lot of work bringing people in. Regulatory measures and changes like the UAE law now allowing non-Muslims to write their own wills and trusts, a break from a system that was until recently shariah-dominated by default for everyone, provide a strong backbone and a positive outlook for those families, he says. Combined with DIFC and ADGM's common-law frameworks, that has turned the UAE into a jurisdiction long-horizon capital can actually plan around.

The UAE has already become one of several key markets families seek to include in their multi-jurisdiction portfolios, Kapur explains. This is the same distinction Henley & Partners drew when we spoke to them back in April — between families adding residency options and families actually reallocating wealth. Experts told us at the time that people who are reviewing other residency options are likely hedging and diversifying their portfolios, as opposed to making a decision to leave permanently.

Not everyone who banks in the UAE actually lives in the UAE anyway. Roughly 40% of Mashreq Private Bank's client base doesn't reside in the UAE at all, but treats it, in Kapur's words, as close to a second home, because they visit it often and do business there.

That’s where Mashreq’s corridor strategy comes in. Mashreq has built private banking teams inside its existing corporate-banking footprint in places like Hong Kong, the UK, Qatar, and Egypt. Africa is another important corridor where, despite having no branches there, Mashreq serves people who have residencies or business interests in the UAE. That means its clientele is global — it’s not limited to those who reside in the UAE.

Mashreq's identity as a local bank also does real work against international competitors. “We are fortunate that as a local private bank, we have the ability not only to offer your standard mutual funds, bonds, and discretionary mandates, but we can also allow them to get in on local equity trading, invest in local sukuk, and even real estate,” Kapur explains.

As the UAE has drawn more people in along the spectrum of wealth, they’ve also been asking for a more diverse (and longer-term) set of products. “People are increasing their allocation in things like discretionary portfolios and private markets, and things like pre-IPO offerings, which earlier was not the case,” he explains. That’s why Mashreq partnered with Goldman Sachs Asset Management for discretionary portfolio services last year, an initiative that has “done very well,” according to Kapur.

!SubHed! The next wave of demand

The next wave of demand, in Kapur's view, is going to come from the USD 5-10 tn (excluding the US) in wealth expected to change hands from one generation to the next over the next decade, and the UAE has its own share of that coming due. The number that should worry every incumbent private bank, Kapur says, is the adviser-churn rate that comes with it: “It is estimated that every time wealth moves from the older, the last generation onto the new ones, they change their advisors 80 to 90% of the time,” he says.

That’s a retention risk on the clients banks already have, and an acquisition opportunity on everyone else's book at the same time. How Mashreq is preparing for that new reality: Building a diverse proposition that adds products like equity trading and crypto management to what used to be a fairly conservative product set; building digital solutions that allow a more tech-savvy generation of wealth managers to access their information instantly; and having a holistic relationship spanning wealth, corporate, and consumer banking rather than wealth management alone, since younger heirs inheriting businesses are increasingly looking for capital-raising and structured agreement support, not just portfolio management.

The AI build that targets the younger generation is already here: The bank is combining client information and behavioral data with near-real-time market data to build what Kapur describes as individually structured AI agents for each client, a shift from the one-size-fits-all research notes that private banks have relied on for decades. That build is currently in internal “friends and family” pilot testing, with the first client-facing use cases expected to roll out later this year. That’s alongside their wealth app, which they’re frequently developing.

Crucially, Kapur doesn't frame agents as a replacement for the relationship manager — he frames it as the thing that makes the relationship manager's job possible at the pace clients now expect. Mashreq's model is explicitly hybrid: a client's activity on the wealth app feeds directly to their relationship manager, so a client who's been researching a product on the app doesn't have to re-explain it on a call. It cuts time and helps the conversations become more direct and the client more informed.